


animal to your body

by Catherines_Collections



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Hunters, Codependency, Haunting, M/M, Monster Hunters, Psychic Abilities, Psychic Bond, Purposeful Ambiguity, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-01 13:15:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18335075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catherines_Collections/pseuds/Catherines_Collections
Summary: Shane asks, “You know what the best part of a ghost story is?”And Ryan could name the three burning his tongue and still come back to red hands.





	animal to your body

**Author's Note:**

> .
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Alternatively— how they can be both the monster beneath each other’s beds and the ones chasing it.
> 
>  
> 
> .

 

 

 

There’s a story, somewhere, Ryan’s sure, about what happens to shadows who cross the sun over too many times.

 

One about how what comes in doesn’t always come back out the same, and that most times what can’t bend just breaks into something different— not usually for the better. A little more slanted than before, a tilted memorial.

 

Sometimes, the worst tastes like ash and Ryan still can’t find a way to bleed it from his tongue. So he salts the ground they’ve already crossed behind them and starts over.

 

Again.

 

And again. And again.

 

They’re getting used to it, the middle space. Occupying the bridge between the distance they can’t seem to find and the track they’ve already reached.

 

Ryan spreads more salt across sun-bleached concrete, follows the silhouette laughing in front of him, and doesn’t think about finding it.

 

 

.

 

 

Sometimes, he thinks, he can’t keep the months straight.

 

It’s hard to track what you don’t want to recall back the way it came. Especially when you’ve diluted it with purpose. It makes things messy. Messier, mostly.

 

On better days, Ryan can count their time down to the hours. Others, he can name how many days he’s spent with red on his hands— one, twelve, twenty five, thirty nine.

 

Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas mix in there too, somewhere, until all the states they’ve crossed fade into each other, close enough to lose names.

 

They’re getting used to it.

 

The radio plays slow over gray and cracked and yellow lining. It watches motels with them, tracks and treads the line lightly.

 

Two hotels rooms and one spirit. Twelve teeth and the thing that came crawling back for them.

 

  
Shane cuts in with a careful, “Hey.”

 

The radio doesn’t shut off like they both know it should. Maybe it’s progress or maybe it’s a fluke. Ryan isn’t counting anymore and Shane doesn’t do a great job of convincing anyone he ever did.

 

He can feel Shane looking at him, reads the mood and knows he’s been calculating it— the song, the moment, the way the antenna doesn’t short out. All of it very clever.

 

It’s a familiar game and Ryan doesn’t mind playing it, eases into the steps and molds his shape back around them.

 

Shane turns his head just enough to look towards him, and it’s close and careful and familiar.

 

He’s still keeping a decent lock on the road, but it’s blatantly premeditated and a kind enough movement to read that Ryan doesn’t mind.

 

“Hey,” Ryan says back, light and quiet.

 

It’s not an echo. It’s his thought, Ryan’s interpretation add-in. It’s an important distinction, he likes to think. Ryan has his thoughts and Shane has his actions and they balance out. Mostly.

 

Sometimes. Or, at least, they’re working on it— finding the balance between where they want to be and where they are in relation to the things around them.

 

They’re trying to. It’s fair, maybe.

 

Shane cracks a smile and the radio still plays.

 

The road doesn’t shift and it almost feels irreverent at the cost of the moment.

 

Shane asks, “You know what the best part about a ghost story is?”

  
And there aren’t any other cars for miles. Ryan could crack his skull open and no one would know besides Shane and the road. It still doesn’t feel like a secret and maybe that’s what keeps it from working.

 

Ryan can name three off the top of his head, but he bites his tongue so he doesn’t have to.

 

Instead he hums, counts another deer so he doesn’t have to turn around, asks, “What?”

 

Maybe this one’s an echo.

 

Shane opens his mouth and the radio cuts out.

 

Static filters in and when Ryan looks up he can’t see the deer in any of the mirrors.

 

If it’s a sign to stop, they still don’t take it.

 

 

.

 

 

They end up in Colorado.

 

Shane buys the room and Ryan changes the plates and they meet back with vending machine feast on a run down motel floor.

 

They’ve been in worse.

 

“I think,” Ryan starts, watching Shane grab another handful of corn chips. His thoughts are ten miles and minute, beating him to the finish before he even knows what he wants to say. They can hear a couple laughing next door through the wall, and Ryan still can't catch his thoughts.  
  
He isn’t envious. He isn’t anything. He’s—

 

“I think I’m gonna shower,” Ryan settles on, and starts to stand. He runs his hands across his jeans and doesn’t look up.

 

If there’s a pause in Shane’s acceptance, he doesn’t show it.

 

“Okay,” Shane shrugs, leans back and tilts his head, pretends like he isn’t calculating the same way Ryan knows he is. His eyes glint dark off the motel’s rusted fan.

 

They’re getting better at reading each other, and Ryan can see something there doesn’t watch to touch.

 

He stretches, says, “See you in the morning.”

 

He turns on the water before he’s fully in the bathroom. When he shuts the door, he bites his tongue and doesn’t think about the blood.

 

When the mirror shatters, he doesn't flinch.

 

The shower steams and he steps in, face first, still running red.

 

They’re back on the road seven hours later.

 

 

.

 

 

The first time Ryan came back bloodied, Shane didn’t ask.

 

He took one look at his shirt, saw the teeth and tools, and helped Ryan lay his clothes out on the match Ryan had lit himself.

 

The next morning they were on the road with two duffel bags and a yellow burning trail behind them.

 

They went three states without talking about it and nearly died in the one that ripped it out. Ryan pulled three teeth from his forearm and Shane found one in his wrist.

 

The roots were black ashed instead of red, but it didn’t make it better.

 

There’s something to be said for watching the thing you thought you had killed come back hungry for you.

 

Later, after Ryan pulled out his first-aid kit and started sewing their skin back, he bent over, second time bloodied in front of Shane, and said, “I know you don’t believe, and I know I can’t explain it, but I’ve—“

 

“—been seeing things,” Shane finished, hissing when Ryan pulled the wound closed, and neither of them looked over. Neither of them flinched, either, and he likes to think that was important.

 

“Yeah,” Ryan said, careful, and thought he was going to flood over from all of it. His skin felt tingly and too tight.

 

The motel carpet was green and Shane laughed when Ryan fell back on it after he’d finished the stitches, facing the stucco framed ceiling and trying to remember how to breathe right.

 

“You know,” Shane said. “That I can see the things you carry to your car, right? And I’ve seen your search history. _And_ you’ve always been a little too involved with the ‘supernatural’ for it not to mean something. It’s like you’re wearing a flashing sign sometimes. It had to mean something.”

 

“I don’t,” Ryan started, stopped laughing long enough to cut in. “I don’t try to advertise it. And I don’t _try_ to kill first, you know. But sometimes—.”

 

Ryan stopped laughing. The fan slowed to a stop above them and he could feel Shane looking at him.

 

“Sometimes, there’s more shit than I thought I could handle and it’s _me_ or _it_ and either way it’s still a shitty choice.”

 

When his breathing finally leveled out, he could hear Shane humming. He should have asked, he knows. What made Shane follow; what follows Shane in every mirror Ryan catches him in.

 

Ryan didn’t remember closing his eyes.

 

They woke up it was ten hours later and left the next afternoon. Ryan still didn’t ask, but his lungs didn’t feel like ice so he still took it as a win.

 

None of it suddenly made the bodies worth it, but the next time it happened, the blood seemed to flow a little less red.

 

 

.

 

  
  
“My name’s in a paper somewhere,” Ryan says, one night.

 

They’re tired and stained and still _running running running_ from whatever new thing there is out there trying to catch them.

 

“Paper! That’s gotta count for something. I’m not a complete figment.”

  
This time, he thinks, they’re somewhere in Texas. Close to Tennessee, at least. He wants to believe there’s no rhyme or reason to what they’re doing, that it’s become routine to try and help the towns they pass through.

 

Most times, they work like this:

 

Things that aren’t _supposed_ to be things find them, Ryan knows how to stop them, and Shane helps cover it up.

 

He likes to think they’re doing more than just running. He has scars up his arms to prove it  

 

Shane’s smiling at the ceiling and Ryan wants to rip the nails out.

 

Shane adds, “It sounds poetic when you put it like that— ‘The Haunting Hero.’ Now that’s a charmer. What a line.”

 

  
The nails start to look nicer the longer Ryan looks at them, so he closes his eyes and drags a finger across his wrist in shapes, trying not to think.

 

He isn’t focused when he says, “Poetics can kiss my holy water ass. You know, I came closest at Bobby Adkins’ sixth birthday party. No one believed me about the ghoul in the walls, but his parents still blamed me for the fires.”

 

The stretch of silence that follows lasts long enough that he peaks an eye open at Shane across the room. He’s still looking at the ceiling.

 

Another pause and then Shane asks, quiet, “That long?”

 

And Ryan doesn’t have a good answer. His hands are still red. They’re still anywhere but home and one answer isn’t going to change any of it.

 

He looks back at the nails and thinks again about peeling them off.

 

He settles on, “It doesn’t matter anyway. Makes it all easier, right? I don’t need people recognizing my face on the street.”

 

“Recognition can be good,” Shane adds, and Ryan can tell he isn’t ready to let it go. “I never got any, either, for the record.”

 

Ryan doesn’t know if that’s supposed to make him feel better, but he snorts anyway.

 

“Well, I guess it’s a draw. ‘Cause I’m pretty sure you can’t win ‘most missed’ in a category that claims neither of us exist. It isn’t a competition.”

  
  
Shane sits up slowly, looks out the window before Ryan can catch a glimpse of his face. He doesn’t know which reading of the room to trust so he doesn’t say anything else.

 

Shane leans on the window and speaks for him, “Maybe we can make it one.”

  
  
Ryan has never been good at telling him no

 

.

 

 

Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, still headed up through Indiana.

 

“You know, if we start from Texas we can cut our way back up. Pretty sure I’ve heard a few ghost stories about some abandoned places near a small town east of Austen.”

  
  
Shane nods once, serious, before it cracks into a laugh, “I’m pretty sure we are a ghost story by now.”

 

Ryan folds up the map and throws it back on the dashboard, “Well, it never hurts to build onto legends.”

 

If Shane disagrees he doesn’t let it tint his smile.

 

 

.

 

 

It's important, he knows, to remember the difference between a myth and a legend.

 

One keeps your blood inside you while the other dreams about carving everyone else’s out.

 

Ryan has seven scratches across his arm arm for each

 

 

.

 

 

The creature opens its mouth and it’s green and teeth and Ryan’s pulling out his book before Shane has a chance to climb off the floor and  _it's—_

 

Something shatters. Another thing roles across the floor. It might be Shane or it might not. Ryan watches, chants until the fire goes out and shrivels up with the creature’s shrieks.

 

Shane gets six full stitches from this one. Ryan gets four.

 

Ryan is really tired of seeing red.

 

 

.

 

 

Shane turns to him, eyes lit like the match Ryan first pulled out, and says, “Do you know what the best part about being a ghost story is?”

 

And Ryan has California sprayed across his back with Colorado under his nails and the chase of what comes after on his tongue.

 

Ryan doesn’t asks, _What?_ because he knows the answer. They both do. It’s not a new game they're playing but they’re still playing it.

 

Shane smiles and Ryan thinks he can trace each line back to the stretch of road— Tallahassee and Cleveland and Austin. Ryan‘s ripped up too many nails for it, now, and he knows it but doesn’t like it sink skin deep.

 

Ryan doesn’t have to ask _what._ Ryan never has to ask anything.

 

The sun set’s red as blood but he’s watching Shane drive, glances his way just long enough to wink.

 

“The best part about being a ghost story,” Shane starts, and Ryan can feel the wind shift, “is all the truth you can pretend got made up with it.”

 

 

 

 

 

.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I haven’t written here for a while & hope it still holds up. 
> 
> Comments & kudos are very much appreciated.


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